Men Describe Finding Human Head in Shopping Cart

The remains of young man were found inside a folding shopping cart in the Bronx Wednesday night, police said. Erica Byfield reports.

(Published Monday, Aug. 21, 2017)

The remains of young man were found inside a folding shopping cart in the Bronx Wednesday night, police said.

The unidentified remains were discovered by two men collecting cans around 9 p.m. on East 182nd Street in University Heights. The victim's head was sticking out of a cardboard box inside a trash bag in the shopping cart, police said.

One of the men who found the remains told News 4 Thursday he at first thought it was a cantaloupe inside the trash bag.

"I knocked on it with my two fingers and I told him, it has to be a cantaloupe," said Manuel Vega, recalling his conversation with his friend Terry Frazier as the two went through the trash bags in the shopping cart.

"He right away said, 'That is a body. That's a body,'" Vega recalled Frazier telling him. "I said it's not a body, it's a bunch of meat they threw away, and vegetables."

They started opening the plastic bags.

"When he ripped the last one open, we saw the black hair, and when we saw the black hair, that's when I started believing this is a body, he isn't going crazy," said Vega.

Video shows how the cart got to that intersection of the Bronx: in one clip from Tuesday night, a man pushes the cart down Walton Avenue, leaves it by a pile of trash and walks away. A half-hour later, a woman, who's an apartment maintenance worker, struggles to move it and eventually pushes it onto East 182nd Street, where it ended up sitting by a tree for a day before Vega and his friend stumbled upon it.

Police say they're investigating the video and whether the people seen pushing the cart have any involvement in the death of the person in the cart.

Authorities said the victim appears to be in his late teens or early 20s.